ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS AND LEGAL PRIVILEDGE
IF YOU INVESTIGATE ACCIDENTS AT WORK BE VERY CAREFUL
Every day hundreds of health and safety managers and business owners undertake accident investigations in their place of work. Your investigation results may lead to prosecution!!!!!!
WE DO NEED TO INVESTIGATE ACCIDENTS
Every day in the UK there are accidents at work. Once the dust settles health and safety managers and other personnel go to great lengths and considerable cost to investigate the accident. This may include taking photos, interviewing witnesses and then spending many hours to produce meaningful reports to present to senior management. Whilst the intentions may well be good and hopefully future accidents will be prevented, Companies need to be aware that unless you protect your investigation it becomes retriveable data, so the HSE and other Enforcing Authorities may well discover this document in future investigations and use it against you. So if the findings of your investigation conclude that the company has not invested in suitable training or has failed to conduct suitable and sufficient risk assessments, you are actually documenting the fact that the company has been breaking the law.
So what's to be done? The answer is really very simple and not too costly. Because of the fact that the report could have adverse legal implications to your company you can simply have a chat with a lawyer and make the investigation report subject to Legal Priviledge, this way, legally, your information remains within the company.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
BEFORE accidents occur, all companies should have a clealry defined Crisis Management Plan. It need not be complicated. Let us take an example, a worker is killed by a forklift truck in the warehouse, what should happen? who do you call? who deals with the press? who advises employees? who arranges for staff counselling services? These things need to be carefully planned BEFORE the incident. It's too late once you have the HSE, Police and possibly other Authorities crawling all over your workplace demanding to see documents, interview staff and grilling management, possibly with a view to prosecuting you.
Do you fully understand the powers that the Authorities have? are they allowed to simply demand to interview people? are there different types of interview? with differing legal ramifications?
The time to act is now because even with the best health and safety systems and risk management procedures, accidents will happen.
If you wish to discuss any of these issues in greater detail simply contact www.scsl.org.uk or call 0800 411 8280 where we can give you some tailored advice specific to your circumstances.
